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Daily Archives: October 27, 2009

When I noticed the Android 2.0 software development kit had been launched, I hurried up and installed it. Okay, it did take the better part of 5 hours before it was properly installed, as Google’s servers were probably overloaded. None the less, I managed it at least, and fired up an Android 2.0 emulator, taking a moment to marvel at the fancy new settings that have been added for creating AVDs, before hurrying on to install my app, Xydroid.

As usual, it exhibited the crash right at first time start, probably as both the main thread and the update thread try to create the database, and they step on each others toes. I’ll be sure to get that fixed any day now. Somehow.

There’s also a new crash, though — this one is right after adding a new source, where the app tries to launch an activity that lets the user select the services to monitor. This gets a runtime error with a null pointer exception, whereas launching the activity separately, after the source has been added works fine. This could be a change in the way bundles between activities are handled in Android 2.0 versus 1.6.

I will probably have to get my act together and release a version 0.3 with these couple of bugs fixed, as well as plenty of testing done for differing screen sizes. One of the great advantages of Android can be said to be the number of different devices you can use it on — and it’s one of the major drawbacks as well, as there will always be a lot of different things to consider when designing the user interface. I do still prefer it over the iPhone, though 🙂

A short while ago, I asked what Google were going to do with PIM in Android. Now it seems there’s an answer, or at least part of it, in the release of the Android 2.0 SDK: They’re going to support third party adapters.

Third-party “sync adapters” allow apps to tie in to the phone’s sync services

Hopefully, this means they’re actually going to start working on some nice built-in adapters as well, but at least it seems they’re opening up the sync parts of the platform from 2.0, contrary to what had earlier been reported. Yay.